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CiviCRM Updates

Coming back from the Calgary CiviCamp and Sprint, I started reflecting on this fantastic experience and what it takes to create a CiviCRM community. This prompted me to share some thoughts about what makes these events so positive and memorable for all attendees and specifically our end-users.

Following what was a successful annual gathering for CiviCRM community at CiviCON St. Louis, the traditional Sprint commenced boasting 35 in attendance including participants from New Zealand, UK, Canada, and folks from all over the US from the east to west coasts. The Sprint is an annual opportunity for the CiviCRM community to come together and work on developing the CiviCRM software in a context that allows face-to-face interaction as opposed to the usual remote work and conversations.

The location is set so you can start making travel plans to attend this year's CiviCon in St. Louis!

CiviCRM is the leading open source CRM in the world, powering nearly 11,000 nonprofits and civic sector organizations focused on meaningful impact. As the largest CiviCRM conference in North America, CiviCon St. Louis will showcase the incredible capabilities and community around CiviCRM, offering opportunities and insights into fundraising, communications and overall organizational management.

Some may know that CiviCRM operates in many different languages quite effectively. This is a feature receiving consistent improvements, the most recent being the ability for mass emails to identify the spoken language of the mailing recipient.

Until now, there was no effective way for CiviCRM to determine the target language of mail merge tokens when mass emailing. Consequently, many emails would end up with:

According to the latest community wide survey that CiviCRM Core Team did earlier this year there is a great need for ongoing training. As CiviCRM is a very rich and powerful CRM for nonprofits, it usually requires some training to optimize its potential and to adapt it to the needs of each organization.

One of the top goals for the CiviCRM roadmap is to improve the theming to look good on more websites and devices. Briefly, here's a look at what is happening so far:

DASHBOARD IMPROVEMENTS
As of CiviCRM 4.7.11 the dashboard has a face lift. It loads faster, looks better, and refreshes itself automatically so you always have the latest information. And 4.7.13 will include a responsive layout that works great even on tiny screens.

A few months ago, the core team announced a new strategy for driving CiviCRM development: LExIM. Since then, this strategy has been implemented and has had significant impact in the CiviCRM ecosystem. Yet, it is still not well known by the majority of our end-users. So let's dive in ...

CiviCON London is Europe's biggest CiviCRM conference, bringing together 200 users, implementers and developers all under one roof. Following hot on the heels of CiviCon Colorado, we are excited to be gearing up for the European leg of the 2016 CiviCRM conference program.

Announcing CiviCRM Jobs! In an effort to cultivate their passion for community involvement and to create more opportunities to engage people through the use of a software application, CiviCRM has created a simple jobs board. This board is intended to connect organizations with talent within the CiviCRM ecosystem. Job postings are free until August 15th! After that, there will be a nominal fee to post to the board to help fund the ongoing efforts of the Core Team.